The Man to Be Reckoned With

Wicked lights glinted in his gaze. “British Virgin Islands.”

Her leg dangled midway over the footpath as if she were a puppet being pulled by strings. “Like going there? Us?”

“Yes.”

Alarm bells clanged in her head. “Why?”

He moved closer. She caught the instant need to step back. “A project of mine has come to the execution stages. It’ll suit very well to see what your precious team and you are made of. Sort of a test before I flush you guys.”

“A trip to Virgin Islands just to test us seems like the kind of extravagance that adds a lot of overhead to small, itty-bitty companies. I would rather—”

“Didn’t I tell you? Your finances, your projects—everything’s on probation.” Arrogance dripped from his every word, every gesture. “A skeleton crew will keep the website and sales going.”

She swallowed the protest that rose to her lips. She’d have to just show him what she and her team were made of. Navigating to the calendar on her phone, she synced it and opened his shared calendar. Tilting her head up, she leveled a direct look at him. “Robert is back tonight. Should I go ahead and block your time, then?”

A mocking smile lingered on his lips as he studied her. Her breath felt tight in her chest as she willed herself to stay still under the devouring gaze. “We won’t return for a few days.”

“I don’t see the need for—”

“I’m beginning to see why your investors were so eager to jump ship. You don’t want to make money, and you don’t listen to advice or input of any kind. It’s almost as though you live and work in isolation.”

“That’s not true. I...”

Folding his hands, he raised an eyebrow.

Something about the look in his face grated on her. But she didn’t want to give him a single reason to back out of their deal. “Fine. I’m ready to go.”

Faced with her increasingly unignorable reaction to him, she found it tempting to just accept defeat, sign away the dratted estate and walk away. Except she had heard the stunned silence when Jackie told Robert that Nathan was here. She had heard his hopes, his pain in the one request he had made of her.

“Whatever he wants, please say yes, Riya. I want to see my son.”

It was the first time Robert had ever asked anything of her.

Guiding her along with him, Nathan crossed the small, dingy street that housed their office to the opposite side. Every inch of her tautened as the muscled length of his thigh grazed hers.

“Which island are we visiting?” she said pushing her misgivings down. Robert and her company, she must keep her reasons at the center of her mind.

“Mine.”

She slid into the limo and crossed her legs as he occupied the opposite seat. “You own one of the Virgin Islands?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t even own a home.”

Amusement deepened his gaze. “Been reading up on me?”

She shrugged, as if she hadn’t devoured the internet looking for every scrap of information on him over the weekend. “There wasn’t really much.”

“What were you hoping to find?”

“Not the list of your assets,” she said, remembering the article he had been featured in in Forbes about the youngest billionaires under thirty. It galled her to admit it, but the man was a genius investor and apparently also one of the leading philanthropists of their generation.

He donated millions to charity and causes the world over, but there hadn’t been a byte about his personal life. What was she to make of him?

“I was looking for something of a personal nature.”

He leveled a shocked look at her. “Why?”

“Jackie told Robert you were back and he asked me a thousand questions about you. I had nothing to tell him apart from the fact that you’re a gazillionaire and an arrogant, heartless SO...”

He narrowed his eyes and Riya sighed. Antagonizing him was going to get her precisely nowhere.